Looking Back (18 page)

When I was eighteen, a friend who was a debutante that year invited me to the Junior League’s annual coming-out ball. I almost didn’t go—I didn’t have a dress or shoes; I worried about whether to wear gloves or not, and how to avoid wearing my yellow vinyl jacket if it rained. I borrowed a dress, finally, bought shoes, pinned up my hair and, since it didn’t rain, went coatless, hoping the hole in my gloves and the grape juice stain on my skirt wouldn’t show, marking me instantly, among the debutantes and Honored Guests, for what I was—a slightly second-hand outsider.

I needn’t have worried about that. I may have stood out, but if I did, it was because I’d overdressed. The ones who really belonged wore their hair down, kicked off their shoes, compared one another’s rummage-sale bow ties and baggy dinner jackets. The debutantes, many of them, made loud and laughing explanations why they’d come out at all (“Isn’t it the silliest thing you’ve ever heard?!!!”) and tried as nearly as  they could to disassociate themselves from everything that had made them Junior Leaguers in the first place. Money and social position—earned with such unquestioning struggle by our parents’ generation—is for us (now that we have it, if we do) something of an embarrassment. We have not gone through the Depression or walked ten miles to school or eaten bacon fat for supper. Whether or not we’re rich—and I’m speaking not just for the few who are—not many of us grew up really poor. (Deprivation was a fifty-cent allowance and a black and white TV.) So we don’t have the respect for money that our parents had. In fact, it’s more a source of guilt. We use it, of course, for our European summers, our college educations, our hairdryers and electric typewriters and ten-speed bicycles, but we romanticize the lives of those without it—people who we, the young, affluent and educated, see with a new sentimentality for The Great Midwest, as the Real Americans inhabiting The Real World. The self-employed farmer, the truck-stop waitress, the lobster fisherman—they are perhaps the closest thing my generation has to heroes.

We play at poverty, proudly broadcasting the occasional destitution brought on by the unexpected expense of a new needle for the stereo or tires for the car; we speak—in front of blacks particularly—of how we never could have gone to college without such a good scholarship. Summers we go slumming as waitresses and construction workers; back at school we reminisce about our happy days as “menials” (“It’s such a great feeling, working with your hands …”), the fondness coming from the knowledge we won’t be spending our whole lives waiting on tables, living off tips and leftover soup
du jour.
I cannot really criticize—I do it too—but I can comment. It would be silly to wish we didn’t have the comfort we have. I could wish, though, that, having it, we didn’t pretend otherwise. Admiring poverty or simplicity for its own sake, with guilt and condescension, seems misguided. What we’re really doing is acting poor and living rich, scorning money while living as tidily subsidized students, getting paid simply to read and think.

Our snobbery has reversed itself now so that, while ghetto inhabitants still strive for Cadillacs, the rest—the ones who have the luxury not to care—are buying ’57 Chevys. Shabby overalls that show the mark of having worked the fields and ankle-length cotton dusters, faded from a hundred washings, and denim work shirts with the elbows worn right through are more than fashion fads, they’re evidences of this playing-poor routine. Some of us cultivate it in our speech—twanging a little, saying our -ing words southern style, like huntin’, readin’, farmin’ and, a favorite verb, “truckin.” To us—the summer-vacation home-folk, the weekend farmers, the rummage sale customers who pay by check—a gas-pump job seems almost romantic and hitchhiking is the preferred means of travel, not because it’s cheaper but because it’s how you meet “the
real
people.”

Just about every suburban-born, college-bred boy I know has a hitchhiking story about “this real great truck driver” he met, the kind of salt-of-the-earth, natural man who hasn’t read a book in twenty years but who, his hitchhiking passengers tell me, “knows what it’s all about.” He’s usually called Joe or Red, this potato-and-beef hauling everyman, and his life’s a little tragic (he sleeps in the cab of his truck and spends Christmas on the road, staring out at colored lights blinking through windows), but it is simple, honest, free. He is a philosopher of the road who has given the boy—because
this
boy is special—some parting nugget of Truth as he lets him out at Exit 1 for New Haven or Exit 23 for Cambridge, some words of wisdom the boy now imparts to me, over coffee and deeply inhaled nonfilter cigarettes in the campus grill.

We’re all in search of sages. Information surrounds us. Facts about North Vietnamese dead and grams of carbohydrate in Rice Krispies and points lost on the stock exchange and TV stars’ divorces are drilled into us like lists of vocabulary words for college boards. Oh, the new trend in education, while we were in school, leaned toward “concepts” and away from what we called “specifics.” Vagueness—we called it bullshitting—was often easy on our high school essay question exams. But in spite of the generalities we met with at school, there was a feeling of being overwhelmed by details. Every succeeding generation has just that many more years of history to study—more presidents, more planets (Pluto had not yet been discovered when my father was in school. Neither had DNA). We were bombarded outside the classroom most of all by—it’s a cliché, but it’s true too—the constantly expanding forces of the media, magazines too numerous to fit in the racks, TVs in every house and even, later, in a lot of dormitory rooms and car radios we’re so accustomed to that only when they’re turned off do we notice they were on. A whole new area of expertise has been developed (it should be a college major, and will be someday soon, perhaps): the field of trivia. TV game shows, awarding cars and minks and refrigerator-freezers to the ones who know the most cereal-box-type information, have glorified it for us. Watching those shows I am amazed to discover how much I know, without knowing I knew it. I answer bonus questions without thinking, like the reincarnated Bridey Murphy speaking in a dialect she claimed she’d never heard.

All of which cannot help cluttering the mind. It’s an unscientific notion that, like a cupboard, the brain has only so many shelves, before things start to crowd and fall out, but I often get the feeling that I haven’t space left to spread out my thoughts and see what I have. Loose links clanking in my head, and no chain, I long for—capital W—Wisdom. We all do, I think, in this era of overly data-processed, glutted computers. Teachers were rarely funds of knowledge for us (they seldom knew more than what the textbooks taught, keeping one step ahead, reading the chapters a day before they were assigned). Parents, cautioned in the age of permissiveness not to overburden with advice, and confused, themselves, sometimes to the point of despair, could give little. The venerable God died during our youth. (I still remember the orange and black cover of
Time
magazine one week—“Is God Dead?”—the phrase and the notion were brand-new then, and though he’d never been alive for me in the first place, the idea of his death, death of one of the few existing sages—even a mythical one—disturbed me.)

Indeed, so many of our childhood authority figures made a point of
not
being profound, wary of being laughed at for seriousness by what they took to be a sharp, tough, unsentimental bunch of smart-aleck cynics. Actually, we didn’t turn out that way at all. My contemporaries surprise me for what is at times their mushiness—their damp-eyed reading of
Love Story
and the thin volumes of Rod McKuen’s emaciated poetry; their trust in the occult and all things astrological, following the daily horoscope with a faith they never gave, when we were younger and regarded as more gullible, to fortune-cookie prophecies and tea-leaf aphorisms.

The absence of true sages—men of deep sensibility, even, in our lives—leads us to make false gods of rock poets and grade-B philosophers, injecting comics and children’s books with significance their authors never knew they had. We, who so hated school, are in search now of
teachers.
An apricot-robed, lotus-folded guru with a name too long to pronounce, an old man on a park bench, with a beard if possible, a plain-talking, no-nonsense Maine farmer with a pitchfork in his hand, the author of any slim volume of austere prose or poetry (the fewer words he writes, the more profound each one must be)—we attend their words so abjectly, sometimes even literally sit at their feet, waiting for any crumb of what will pass as wisdom to be offered us.

I remember a show-and-tell day when I was in fourth grade. I brought in a pot holder I’d woven, someone displayed a sea anemone and someone else explained the engine of his model car, and one boy brought his rosary beads and his crucifix, and took from his wallet a photograph of his priest and himself beside their church. We were all too stunned to laugh at first, but then the giggling started, until we were all hiccuping and one boy had to run off to the bathroom without waiting for a pass, and even the teacher was smiling, because religion was something shameful, the soft underside some of us had, but kept concealed, certainly. (Going to church was OK, like going to Brownies. But to speak, as Ralphie Leveque did, of loving God and of the blood of Christ, and Mary’s tears and thorns and nails—that seemed almost dirty.)

Now, while the fourth graders might still giggle, Jesus has come out of the closet. The disenchanted, and the ones never enchanted in the first place, are returning to the fold with a passion their once-a-week religious parents never possessed. It is a sign of many things: an attempt to purify the spirit, to be drenched in holy waters after a drug-filled adolescence, a form of the new nostalgia, even—almost
camp.
What’s really going on, though, in the Jesus movement, is our search for a prophet, for someone who can, for a change, tell us the answers. (The big line, in our school days, was “There is no one right answer. What’s your
opinion
?”) After so many unprofound facts and so much loose, undisciplined freedom, it’s comforting to have a creed to follow and a cross to bear.

Take a look at the windows of any up-to-date department store and you’ll discover plenty about the mood of the country. For a while it was China—not just summit meetings with Chou En-lai, but stuffed pandas and (Mrs. Mao Tse-tung would be amused) newly stylish workers’ pajamas just like the ones they wear in China. Pregnancy-simulating pillows (worn under smocks) were surely some kind of reaction to ZPG and abortion. First midiskirts, then hotpants told us something about the ups and downs of mood and daring; and now, well, now it’s children’s clothes. Not for children. They are busy transcending childhood with toddler-sized bikinis and bell bottoms. But grown-ups and almost-grown-ups are turning, in this over-sophisticated world, to the reassuring simplicity of childhood. As I write this, the store windows are filled with pinafores and puffed sleeves, smocks and knee socks and Mary Janes and ponytails tied with ribbons or held in place with a plastic rabbit. Colors are pale pink and sky-blue and Easter-chick yellow; prints show Mickey Mouse and lollipops. Kids are
in.

The trend goes beyond fashion. On college campuses there’s a sudden interest in children—not in the detached, analytical perspective of child psychology, but in a way that attempts to recapture childhood for its students. (One of Yale’s most popular seminars during my freshman year was a study of children’s literature.) Students are far less likely to carry Piaget or Bruner than Andersen’s
Fairy Tales, Winnie the Pooh, The Little Prince.
They write dissertations on comic books and tune in daily to “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood” and “Sesame Street” (particularly good when stoned). It isn’t just camp either; camp is for the cool steel-and-plastic territory of Andy Warhol and Ultra Violet. No tongue-in-cheek, no put-ons, no kidding: childhood and children are serious subjects.

Because they are closer than adults to instinct and because they supposedly haven’t yet discovered the art of deception, children are viewed by my contemporaries, childhood-worshipers on the verge of adulthood, as the bearers of some ultimate wisdom. Children’s books are examined for nonexistent symbolism and their actions are imitated—in clothes and speech and movements and games—as if, by artificially reconstructing childhood, we could restore the innocence that goes along with it. It’s a post-drug, post-free love reaction, maybe, the child vogue—an attempted return to the good old days when rules were laid down and life was simpler.

M
Y GENERATION—THE ONE
that places so much importance on
communication—
seems to be abandoning language. Where once a person stopped to breathe or to think, now he fills the gaps with passwords from a kind of code that summons, in an instant, all that’s young and hip and
together—
rock music, patched blue jeans, bare feet, Herman Hesse, marijuana and yoghurt. We no longer need to say who we are; we can talk in a shorthand that says everything for us. That’s what “you know” really means:
you know
what I mean, so why should I bother to say it?

The new language is called colorful and expressive. Often it’s pretty flat and repetitive, the same toneless superlatives and fuzzy adjectives repeated time and again until “Far out” means nothing, because nothing is described as less. The words are few—not enough to fill a dictionary page but enough to build a vocabulary around: trip, hassle, dig, head, man, together, where I’m at, like (half-built bridge to a never-completed simile) and, of course,
you know.
We no longer strive for eloquence. (Debating—the sport of the aristocracy—has been replaced by rapping. Debaters remind us now of businessmen—three-piece suits, brief cases filled with facts, no room for feelings—whose rhetoric becomes the tool of evasiveness.) Polished speech has come to be regarded almost as a form of snobbery; adjectives, like color TV sets and second cars, seem almost decadent. I find myself cultivating impurities in my speech, diluting thoughts with
ums
that weren’t there to begin with, mumbling, almost, and slowing down to the new, 33½ rpm as if the thoughts that come out are so complex they required all those pauses for meditation. Few of them do.